Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Much later, when she was not around anymore, C-plus would go back and watch video of Maeve in those days, making trouble during Q & A time at ACTANSS sessions.

  “I get what you’re on about,” she insists, to an eminent but somewhat dense neurologist at ACTANSS 4, “but if your thinking becomes normative, and the system expects it, does that mean I won’t have legs in Bitworld? Because when you scan my corpse, my toes are going to come up missing, aren’t they? My avatar will be lacking those, I take it. Once an amputee, always an amputee.”

  “Understood,” says the neurologist, “but the nerves that used to lead down to your toes are still there. They are truncated at the knee, yes. But above, where they connect to the parts of your brain involved in motor functions and so on, the connections are still there. Somewhat atrophied, perhaps—”

  “‘Atrophy’ is not a word I love,” Maeve cuts him off. “Look, our brains adapt. Mine has adapted to not having lower legs. When I was a child, I had phantom pain; now I don’t. Call it atrophy if you want. To me it’s plasticity. Adaptation. Growth. Eutrophy.”

  “Call it what you like,” says the neurologist. “That adaptation will of course be reflected in a scan of your brain. And as such it will be correctly simulated when a process based on that scan is booted up. Beyond that, to be honest, we don’t know much. Because we still don’t know why souls in Bitworld adopt the forms that they do. And so I simply cannot tell you what shape your simulated body will take. I would hope that it would develop a normal set of lower legs and learn to use them.”

  At this point Corvallis looks away, almost wincing, because he knows that the neurologist has stepped in it big-time. But instead of burning him to the ground, Maeve visibly checks herself and decides to educate him. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to think of it. It’s more that she’s thinking out loud—articulating for the first time a set of ideas that have been incubating at least since her first failed startup.

  “I would hope not,” she says. Then, perhaps realizing she’s in danger of being written off as a mouthy firebrand, she changes tack a little. “Or rather, I would hope for more than you seem comfortable with. And that’s what I want to push on. Your comfort level. Why it is where it is. How the boundaries could be messed with. Dodge has wings.”

  “What!?” He’s caught off balance, not following the shifts.

  “Dodge has wings,” she repeats. “We don’t know when he acquired them, because he already had them when the LVU was first brought online. He and the other Mag Zero to Two processes have weird idiomorphic bodies. Some don’t have bodies at all. They were all booted up from scans that we now consider to be lower resolution. Head-only scans—they were all effectively decapitated, weren’t they? Now, that’s what I call an amputee! So they had to regrow bodies. They made them up as they went along. The new processes, on the other hand, are based on better scans—all the way down to the stumps—and at the same time we see much less freedom, much less creativity if you will, in body shape among the Mag Three to Four processes. How can we regain that freedom?”

  “Freedom to . . . have a nonhumanoid body?”

  “Yes, I want wings.”

  The neurologist glances nervously off camera. Years later, watching the video, Corvallis knows exactly who he’s looking at: a couple of El’s people, standing there silently, observing this conversation. This makes him nervous because everyone knows, by this point, that El has been creating winged souls—angels?—in Bitworld. It’s one of those things that’s widely known among the kinds of people who go to ACTANSS. But most of those people prefer to whisper about it in bars. Only Maeve is willing to be so indiscreet.

  “Again, we can’t say for certain. I agree that we see correlation between higher-fidelity scans and more conventional humanoid morphology. Does that mean we should deliberately downgrade scan quality? I would be extremely hesitant to take any customer’s remains and scan them at anything less than the best quality we can possibly achieve. And once you have that data? You have to put all of the data at the disposal of the process, you can’t withhold information just based on a vague supposition that doing so would give that process the freedom to sprout wings.”

  “Forget sprouting. What if the wings are already there?” Maeve asks.

  “I don’t understand what you mean by that.”

  “Neurologically. What if the brain is already hooked up in such a way that it ‘knows’ it has wings?”

  “Go on. Because to be frank this conversation is fun and interesting but I have no idea where you’re going.”

  “My brain started out like yours. It thought it had toes. Then my legs were removed. At first I had phantom pain but then my brain decided it didn’t have toes. If I die tomorrow and get scanned and booted up, that’s still what my simulated brain is going to be expecting.”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “What if my brain does expect wings?”

  The neurologist can do nothing but smile and turn his hands palm-up. Which is how the conversation ends.

  But it was after that that Maeve began to train her brain to expect wings.

  Having a lot of free time and a lot of money made this easier. Virtual reality systems had become awfully convincing by that point. She hired a team of programmers, as well as an aerodynamicist who specialized in the flight of birds, and they rigged up a system in a circus school down by Boeing Field where Maeve could be suspended in a harness from a web of cables that were reeled in or paid out so as to move her through three-dimensional space. A VR rig covered her eyes and fed her matching imagery—most importantly, moving images of imaginary wings, which she could see if she turned her head to one side or the other. Embedded in the same rig were sensors reading faint signals from her brain. Years earlier, such systems had advanced to the point where quadriplegics could use them to control wheelchairs or robotic limbs just by thinking, and Maeve had of course read all of the papers that had been written about the changes that took place in the patients’ brains as they got better and better at using those systems. There were drugs you could take and procedures you could undergo to enhance neuroplasticity. She tried them all, with effects on her personality and on their marriage that were, to put it gently, a personal growth opportunity for Corvallis. When he complained that she was becoming a different person, she reminded him none too gently that this was the entire point of what she was doing. More in that vein spilled out afterward. He got an earful about their first meeting in Moab, the first time they’d had sex, her long-unspoken suspicion that there’d been something a little odd about that encounter. Did C-plus have a thing for amputees? He could say in perfect honesty that he did not. But a helpless woman who needed saving? Maybe.

  So he backed away and stopped sharing his opinions and his concerns about what she was doing. It was fascinating. Far outside the bounds of legit peer-reviewed research. More of a performance art project. But there were noble precedents for art leading the way and science following in its wake. Under the cover of art, she was able to take it to a place where scientists were at least willing to attend demonstrations at ACTANSS, watch Maeve “fly” through a simulated environment, and to look at the data visualizations where she and her staff showed data about what was going on in her brain.

  From the very beginning, El’s people paid very close attention indeed. More than once, when Maeve began a new branch of her investigation, she found evidence that researchers based in Zelrijk-Aalberg had got there first. Which was hardly surprising. In life, Elmo Shepherd had been no fan of morpho-teleology. And in death, he was surrounded by a host of angels.

  Book 2

  Part 8

  43

  In the Garden lived a boy and a girl. Trees and flowers, herbs, vines, bees, birds, and beasts of various kinds lived there too. But there were no others like them. The Garden was circumscribed on three sides by a sheer wall of stone, and on the fourth side by the Palace. Above was sky, where clouds danced in the day and stars wheeled at night. Below was ear
th, where plants of many kinds spread their roots.

  Gates and doors in the Palace wall opened from time to time. Through them, and through windows let into the same wall, the boy and the girl could sometimes see into the Palace. El lived there, and El’s host. El’s form was like that of the boy and the girl, but larger and brighter. Those of El’s host were also bright, but too they possessed wings that enabled them to fly over the wall like birds.

  Sometimes El or one of his host would emerge from the Palace and come into the Garden and walk with the boy and the girl under the light of the sun or the moon and they would hold discourse of the various things that were to be seen there: the many sorts of plants and animals, and the different types of stone and crystal and metal of which things were made, the movements of the celestial bodies overhead, the changing weather and the patterns formed by wind and cloud and rain.

  One day El came forth from the Palace and bade the girl go to another part of the Garden for a time and amuse herself in whatever manner she saw fit. He then walked with the boy for the entire day, asking him what he knew and understood of all the things that were to be seen there. The boy spoke of the differences between bees, wasps, and other sorts of insects, and related what he knew of their different habits of feeding and nest building. Also the boy answered the questions of El concerning the birds, the various sorts of trees, beasts, and so on. This questioning went on until the sun was low in the sky. El’s last question, as twilight came on, was whether the boy had any questions he wished to ask in turn.

  The boy asked about the stone bowl in the center of the garden, which had seemingly been crafted by some soul for some purpose that was no longer being served; for all it did was fill up with rain and overflow into a stone gutter that ran out to the back wall of the Garden, opposite the Palace, and discharge through a grate of metal bars and run away into some place beyond of which the boy and the girl knew nothing save that it made sighing noises when the wind blew, as though many trees grew there. When leaves fell in the fall, this stone bowl would fill up with them and they would become limp and soggy and turn the water brown. The boy and the girl would scoop the leaves out with their hands so that the water might clarify itself in the next rainfall. But the purpose of having built the stone bowl in the first place was by no means clear to them.

  El smiled and told the boy that his question was a good one and that it showed improvement in the power of his memory and of his intellect. Now was not the time for that question to be answered, but answers might come in due course. El then suggested the boy go and sleep or amuse himself in whatever manner he might choose, and summoned the girl.

  Strangely exhausted by El’s questioning, the boy lay down on a bed of soft grass and slept until morning. His sleep, though, was filled with dreams of many such long conversations in the Garden with El.

  When he awoke, dawn was approaching and the girl was standing there gazing down at him. “All night I walked in the Garden with El,” she said, “and answered many questions. Some of those were new, and forced me to consider things in a way I had not done before, but others struck me as familiar, as though I had answered them many times in the past—though my memory does not contain any clear recollections thereof.”

  “Just now at the end of your conversation with El,” said the boy, “did he ask you whether you had questions for him?”

  “He did,” the girl replied. “And I inquired about the shapes we perceive in the stars, and why they resembled certain forms of things here in the Garden, and whether they had been made thus by El or any other soul. I asked too about the red stars that glow so close together in yonder part of the sky,” she added, pointing toward a fiery blur that was low above the Garden’s west wall, paling in the light of the dawn.

  “And did El supply answers to your questions?” the boy asked.

  “No, but it seemed to me that he was pleased by my having asked them, and he said that I might receive answers later as I became ready to understand such matters.” The girl let herself down to the bed of soft grass where the boy had been sleeping, and reclined on her elbow, then lay down fully.

  “You are weary from the questions of El,” the boy said, “just as I was. Sleep well and then we may have further talk when you are refreshed.”

  The girl slept until the sun was high, and the boy whiled away the hours playing in the stone bowl, making things from bits of wood and leaves, and watching them float down the stone gutter to the grate where the water spated.

  When the girl had awakened, she asked him what he was doing and he spoke of ideas forming in his head of where such floating things could float off to once they had passed out through the grate, supposing that the world beyond the wall was akin to the Garden. He asked the girl whether she had dreamed, and she told a story similar to his, about vague memories of many such conversations in the past between her and El.

  “I dreamed thus too,” said the boy, “and it caused me to question my own memory and whether it faithfully captures all that has occurred in the time since we first came into being here in the Garden.”

  The girl nodded. “It is strange that we have no memories of that first moment. Either we have been here eternally, or we were created at some instant of time before which we did not exist. In either case it would seem that we are not being perfectly served by our faculties of recollection.”

  The boy pondered it for a time and said, “There is a third possibility, which is hinted at by the character of our dreams. And it is that we have been created not just once but many times, as many times or more as the sun has risen over the horizon.”

  “Then why are there not many more of our kind in the Garden?” the girl asked.

  “Perhaps we fall like leaves and cease to be and are remade.”

  The girl nodded. “In the face of El I thought I discerned satisfaction at the answers I gave and the questions I asked. Perhaps we are a thing he remakes from time to time, bettering us with each remaking. The curious dreams we had last night are traces of those earlier girls and boys.”

  “There is a way we might judge the truth of this idea,” said the boy, and he pointed to the ground at the girl’s feet. It was muddy there because of the overflow of the fountain, and her feet had left prints in it wherever she had stepped.

  “I understand,” the girl said. Hand in hand they went off into the Garden searching for a secluded place where the ground was soft and bare, in which they could make some mark that would be preserved even if they fell like leaves and were remade.

  Their search took them to a corner where two walls came together. Because of the shade, few plants grew. So the ground was mostly bare, and damp as well, since the sun did not parch it.

  As they drew closer, the boy stooped to pick up a branch that had fallen from a tree. He snapped it over his knee, thinking he would use it to scratch a mark into the bare earth.

  The girl went on ahead of him, passing through the last low shrubs into the bare place in the corner.

  He heard her exclaim in surprise. He ran to catch up with her and found her gazing down in astonishment.

  There in the angle of bare earth, amid many footprints like theirs, many scratches had been made in the ground. Discarded among them were many broken sticks.

  El entered into the Garden one fine afternoon in the fall and found the boy and the girl at the fountain clearing away leaves. He bade them sit on the curved benches of stone that encircled the fountain. He told them that he was well pleased with their progress. “If you could but remember the state in which you first came into the Garden, you would scarce recognize yourselves,” he said. “You then bore the same relation to what you are now as seeds in the pith of an apple do to this spreading tree.” And he elevated his hands, directing their gaze to an old apple tree above them. “You were then infants. Later you were Boy and Girl. Today, after many years, you are Man and Woman. Nevermore shall the thread of your consciousness be interrupted, save when you lay down to sleep. For my questioning of you, an
d even more so the questions you have begun to ask me in kind, have demonstrated to my satisfaction that your intellect, and the coherence of your souls, has attained a degree of perfection equal to that of others. You may call me Father, as it pleases me to call you my beloved children.”

  The man and the woman were silent for a time as they considered El’s words. Apples had fallen from the tree and lay on the ground. The woman picked up one that had gone soft. She crushed it in her hand. A worm fell from it and landed at her feet. She ignored it, working the pulp of the fruit between her fingers until she felt a small hard object, like a tiny stone. Crossing to the fountain she immersed her hand and stirred it about in the water until the soft pulp had been washed away. Remaining was a hard pip, which she let lie in the hollow of her hand. The surface of the water stilled and became a mirror in which she saw her face as well as those of the man and of bright El, who had come to gaze over her shoulder. In the face of El she thought she perceived some look of concern or bemusement she had not seen before. Then he seemed to become aware that he was being looked on, and his face set itself anew. “My words concerning the apple seed have stirred your curiosity, and led you to new investigations,” he said, “and that is as it should be, for curiosity and the seeking out of greater knowledge are faculties without which no woman or man can be said to have a soul.”